AI that connects: Humanizing the customer journey for a seamless Total Experience

As news of GenAI has continued to light up our news feeds, we’ve all seen the images that conjure up scenes of a robot apocalypse, a dystopian land where humans once lived but have long since met their fate. It makes for a good headline, but it’s simply not where we believe the future of contact center AI is heading. Just as we all thought we’d be jetting around on hoverboards by 2015 after watching futuristic movies, robots are not about to take over the customer experience (CX) industry. Undoubtedly, AI will continue to come into play to optimize self-service, and virtual agents will handle more, but AI is not about to replace agents. We believe AI is not the only thing you need to ready your contact center for the future.

There’s no doubt that AI has the potential to change how contact centers operate for the better, but customer expectations continue to rise. Our research, commissioned with Morning Consult, shows that 26% of consumers might ditch a brand after just one bad experience, up 16% since 2022. Truly great CX will mean balancing implementing AI while breaking barriers between customers, agents, and employees. In doing so, your business will be free to create a memorable, seamless, and, above all, human Total Experience. 

An AI approach that empowers your agents and supervisors and improves empathy and connection is where the sweet spot lies. But where do you even begin? We know implementing AI is daunting, so we’re here to lend a helping hand. This is the topic of our CX spotlight session at Zoomtopia this year. Join us as we delve deeper into how an AI-first Total Experience can help you keep up with your customers as their expectations evolve and the industry transforms. 

First, let’s step back and look at how we got here. It’s no secret that AI is shaking things up and fundamentally changing how contact centers operate. We’re looking at a future where contact center AI could be part of every single customer interaction. From self-service solutions to predictive analytics, auto-summarization capabilities, and everything in between, AI has the capacity to impact contact center efficiencies significantly and, in turn, agent happiness and customer satisfaction.  

Despite AI advancements, customer satisfaction is dropping. The Forrester Customer Experience Index backs up the research we commissioned with Morning Consult. The index has been falling for three years straight, recently hitting an all-time low. What’s happening? We believe it comes down to customers managing their problem-solving process. Customers often struggle to manage multiple channels and unhelpful bots, only to end up waiting for an agent. This disjointed experience is soul-destroying and exhausting for both customers and agents.

The key is to implement AI in a way that actually improves the experience by allowing customers to move fluidly from channel to channel with zero repetition, thanks to agents having their entire history at their fingertips. How to begin? First, make your AI personalized and consistent regardless of how your customers choose to engage. Next, view AI as facilitating a Total Experience that stretches beyond the contact center, empowers agents, and makes interactions seamless for customers.   

Everything you need to know about the customer care industry is in its name. Care. It’s not something that can simply be automated. As humans, we rely on others to help solve our issues and seek out other humans for empathy, understanding, and, perhaps most notably, trust. As Adrian Swinscoe, author and principal of Punk CX, points out in his recent report, Is your contact center future-ready?, it’s no wonder that 88% of all loyalty is generated by a customer’s experience at two points on their journey: what happens around and during their buying experience and when something goes wrong. These two customer journey moments present opportunities to build much-valued trust.

When implemented thoughtfully, AI can help agents deliver a more personalized and emotionally intelligent response. At Zoom, we’ve built our federated AI capabilities for Zoom Contact Center with AI Companion and AI Expert Assist around the belief that AI isn’t about replacing agents — it’s about enhancing their ability to connect with customers. We believe AI will replace repetitive tasks and empower agents to focus on making more personalized connections and building relationships. It can also significantly improve the accuracy of self-service interactions while making them feel more conversational. AI will BOTH improve self-service AND empower agents — which, when combined, help provide better experiences for your customers. 

Start at your front door: Your self-service solution 

Improving your chatbot is a great place to start. Many consumers, especially younger ones, turn to chatbots for quick answers to simple queries. However, many are not enjoying their chatbot experiences. Our recent research, mentioned above, showed that only 42% of chatbot users would consider using them in the future. If, however, chatbots resulted in faster issue resolution and shorter wait times, the likelihood of using them shot up to 73%. 

Zoom Virtual Agent, our self-service AI solution, offers conversational interactions and can automatically connect customers to live agents with a summary of the interaction, helping reduce repetition and frustration. Our next-generation Zoom Virtual Agent takes it up a notch and can handle even more complex queries. It remembers details from previous chats and asks follow-up questions, just as an agent would.

With your chatbot solution often being your “front door” to customer care, upgrading to a virtual agent with a human touch can help create a first impression that keeps customers coming back. But remember, no matter how unique your first engagements are, don’t just go halfway by implementing AI only for self-service. Set the guardrails and know when to bring an agent in.  

 Go further: Support your agents

Agent experience is a low point for contact centers. Attrition rates are rising, with companies reporting a 52% average annual agent turnover rate. With this data, it’s clear to see the opportunity for AI to support and empower agents to feel more fulfilled and less overwhelmed. Agents are the face of your brand; they interact with your customers day in and day out, and they deserve to be celebrated and supported so they can be the best they can be. Just as the data shows that your customers are less likely to stick around after a bad experience, your agents may also be thinking of jumping ship.

AI can mean faster resolution time and reduced after-call work, and offer agents insight and ownership over their schedules and learning. With AI tools like Zoom AI Companion for Contact Center and AI Expert Assist, agents gain support in real time, reducing after-call work and allowing them to focus on what they do best: delivering exceptional customer experiences. As one Zoom customer, Chris Crosby, CEO at VenturesCX, shared at Zoomtopia 2024: “We’ve cut down our aftercall time from 4 and a half minutes to under 30 seconds,” demonstrating the productivity boost AI can provide. Chris also shared that connecting AI Expert Assist with knowledge bases and technical manuals has reduced call times by over 3 minutes.    

Another way to help your agents is by ensuring your knowledge base is up-to-date and easily accessible. AI can help by surfacing the correct information at the right time while your agent is live on a call with a customer, helping them resolve issues more quickly and accurately. In Zoom AI Expert Assist, the next-best action feature acts like a live, personal coach for agents, giving them the best response based on the scenario. Say, for example, if a customer asks about a refund policy, AI Expert Assist will be able to grasp the product context and hunt down the specific answer. It’ll then serve up a ready-to-use response for the agent. Check out our Zoomtopia 2024 CX news for more on our recent releases.

How does this all come together for that Total Experience we mentioned earlier? We’ve shown you how AI can help empower agents and their customers in the contact center, but an agent’s day rarely stops in the contact center. They have team meetings to join, calls to transfer to other parts of the organization, and messages to send to their team and managers. When your business communications are separate from your contact center with different AI solutions for each, this can leave your agents feeling isolated and your customers sore from being stuck on a hamster wheel of repetition and frustration. Here’s what it looks like for an agent and customer enjoying the benefits of an AI-first Total Brand Experience:

A Day in the Life of Total Experience: Happy agent, happy customer 

• Meet Ally. Ally is an agent at Omzo Travel. 
• First thing in the morning, she logs into Zoom Workplace. She jumps on a team call on Zoom Meetings from her Zoom Calendar.
• Her status in Zoom Contact Center shows she’s occupied with a Zoom meeting. Her team hears about a storm heading across the western part of the U.S. that will likely impact customers’ flights.

• She accepts an invitation for an outbound preview call with a customer, Janet. Before she jumps on the call, she can see a Zoom AI Companion summary of Janet’s case to gain context.
• Janet is a VIP customer who must reschedule her flight due to bad weather. Ally can see all this information on her screen in Zoom Contact Center as the call gets connected. Janet is unhappy; her son’s first birthday is this weekend, and she needs to get home. This is going to be a tricky call. 
• Zoom AI Expert Assist automatically brings up prompts to help Ally with the call. AI will guide Ally step-by-step through a call. If a step has been completed, it will automatically skip it.  
• On the same screen, she can see customer sentiment and guidance on her talk speed and speech length while Zoom AI Expert Assist pulls rebooking information and guidance.

• She manages the call so well that Janet’s sentiment shifts to positive. 
• Now, Janet mentions she’d like to book a flight with her air miles. Thanks to Zoom AI Expert Assist's next-best action feature, Ally is prompted to suggest that Janet connect with an Omzo Elite Concierge travel agent to proceed. 
• Ally transfers the call by searching for the Elite Concierge team member and directly connects the call via Zoom Phone. Once the call is transferred, Ally sees an auto disposition and smart note generated by Zoom AI Companion, allowing her to wrap up her call with Janet easily and quickly. 
• The Elite Concierge agent, Elly, is located outside the contact center, but thanks to the Total Experience Zoom offers, Omzo’s back office team can see the customer history and the AI-generated engagement summary and sentiment. With all this knowledge, Elly can book a fantastic vacation for Janet, rounding off a next-level customer experience.
• Back in the contact center, Ally opens up Zoom Quality Management and reviews some of her interaction scorecards. She looks at how the interaction sentiment fared over time, the transcript of her call, and supervisor feedback.

• Pleased with how she dealt with the call and upsold Janet to the Elite Concierge, she shares the call link with Suzie, her supervisor, on Zoom Team Chat.
• Suzie can instantly see the highlights of the call without reviewing all the details, saving her considerable time and effort. She can even find the point in the call when the upsell happened. She captures the moment to share with the team for training via a secure link.
• Wanting to go a step further and celebrate Janet, Suzie decides to share the moment in Workvivo by Zoom, an employee engagement platform that is accessible company-wide.

• Janet is delighted to receive high fives from her colleagues and even gets a shout-out from the CEO. She finishes the day feeling accomplished, supported, and motivated to take on another day in the Omzo contact center. 

While AI will continue to innovate, human agents remain central to delivering exceptional service. This requires an approach to CX that embodies the whole business in an AI-first Total Experience that fosters trust and loyalty with your agents and customers.  

We’d love to help you build lasting relationships with your customers by creating an AI-first Total Experience for your business. 

Watch our full Zoomtopia for Customer Experience spotlight, or reach out today to request a Zoom Contact Center demo from our CX experts. 

Interested in transforming your customer experience to a Total Experience? Check out our Playbook: From Contact Center to Total Experience to learn more.